Are you getting your 8-hour sleep?

New Delhi: As you are drifting off to sleep, it doesn't seem like much is happening. The room gets fuzzy and your eyelids feel heavier and heavier. But what happens next?

A lot does happen, your body relaxes, heart rate goes down even your brain gets to take a break.

However, going without a full quota of shut-eye in this mechanised, 24/7 world has almost become a norm.

Today’s multi-tasker spends more hours at work, raises children, manages a home and taps out e-mails late into the night.

For this ‘wannabe Superman’, eight hours of sleep a day seems to be a waste of time. Little wonder that after a few days of the frenzied pace, accumulated sleep deficit and collective fatigue gang up on him or her.

"It’s a process over a very long period of time where the sleep pattern is affected. It may be irregular or may be much less in terms of hours of sleep, which then gets accumulated," psychologist Arpita Anand says.

If you're not sleeping enough you might go through a stage where you lapse into micro-sleeps lasting a few minutes or seconds without even knowing that you have dozed off.

If you are driving a car or operating dangerous machinery you might find out in a more unpleasant way that you are sleep deprived.

For Creative Director of K Factor Moon Moon, lack of sleep led to poor performance at work.

"When I was working with Nestle, there was so much fatigue level because of which the kind of work that we did had no new look and no new thought. There was no interest level left in you," she says.

Ultimately not sleeping for enough hours took a toll on her health.

"I experienced increased sleepiness during the day, productivity fell, headaches, emotional and behavioral problem. There was even memory and mood problems," she adds.

One way of knowing that you have been sleep deprived is to sit in a comfortable chair in a dark room for for 10 minutes, bereft of distractions, two to three hours after you wake up.

If you fall asleep then you are surely sleep deprived.

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